September 2005 - gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

re: [gutvol-d] Re: here ya go, joey
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 23 Sep '05

23 Sep '05

i will be responding much less frequently to marcello's posts, because he's a troll... but if anyone thinks he makes a good point, just reiterate it, and i'll be happy to address it. i've noticed in the past when i've said this that few people ever restate his points, so i take that to mean y'all are weary of this constant conflict. meanwhile, i'll deliver pudding that proves itself... have a nice weekend! -bowerbird

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re: [gutvol-d] Re: here ya go, joey
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 23 Sep '05

23 Sep '05

and -- as you know -- because jon noring subjects every message that michael hart posts to jon's listserve to moderator control, i'm no longer responding to jon's posts either. our pioneers deserve more respect than that... so if anyone wants me to reply to jon's points, you will have to restate those too. however, don't waste your breath trying to get me to rewrite my .html if it "passes" the "validator". i don't care how many "deprecated" tags i use. again, have a nice weekend! :+) -bowerbird

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Re: here ya go, joey
by joey 23 Sep '05

23 Sep '05

I would fully understand if you didn't care, but here are some things my UA still chokes on. Note that I've implemented my UA to the strictest possible interpretation of the W3C rules because that is all the time I have been able to invest in my UA thus far. Someday, I hope it deals more gracefully with invalid and non-conventional documents, but the time I have to work on projects like this is extremely limited, given that I don't browse the internet unless I'm absolutely forced to. As always, any incorrect statements below are my own. 1) When using a doctype of type "PUBLIC", you should include a URI to the DTD. The proper Doctype decl. with URI for your document would be: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"> 2) Comments MUST begin with "" (although whitespace is allowed between the "--" and the closing bracket (">")). See http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/intro/sgmltut.html#h-3.2.4 This is a problem because you never closed the first comment in your document, which makes the entire document invisible to me. 3) Your validating document actually exposed a flaw in my UA. It doesn't deal well with unquoted attribute values. While it's not REQUIRED to quote all attribute values, I believe it is generally considered good behaviour to do so, and it doesn't seem like it should be terribly difficult to get any decent conversion program to respect that. 4) Even after adjusting the above, I remain unable to view the document, but I have not been able to identify why, as of yet. Luckily, whatever the problem is, the tool tidy(1) is able to clear it up. You can see the result of running tidy(1) on your document by visiting: http://pg.joeysmith.com/ Now, just to check my understanding, this is a document that went from PG-TEI -> zml -> HTML? On Thu, Sep 22, 2005 at 04:35:03PM -0400, Bowerbird(a)aol.com wrote: > joey- > > you can find the validated version of my alice html here: > > > http://snowy.arsc.alaska.edu/bowerbird/alice01/alice01/valice01.html > > -bowerbird

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re: [gutvol-d] what a difference a day makes
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 22 Sep '05

22 Sep '05

joey said: > before you try to invalidate my request because of the browser, > this is the same user agent I use for all my internet activities. i don't want to "invalidate" your request, joey. i just want to know what your "user agent" is. -bowerbird

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re: [gutvol-d] what a difference a day makes
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 22 Sep '05

22 Sep '05

joey said: > My user agent is self-written and is currently > unable to understand HTML files that do not validate. does the "skeleton" file i posted last night work ok in it? > http://snowy.arsc.alaska.edu/bowerbird/skeleton-401.html -bowerbird

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Next Newsletter
by Michael Hart 22 Sep '05

22 Sep '05

Disks and controllers on four Prairienet servers are being upgraded. These servers will be unavailable at various times next Wednesday, September 28th from 8am until work is completed. Thus I am currently planning to post the Newsletter a day early or a day late, either on Tuesday or Thursday, but I may try to get it out Wednesday, in between outages. Michael

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re: [gutvol-d] what a difference a day makes
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 22 Sep '05

22 Sep '05

joey- > I would appreciate a copy > of your validated Alice .html file, > as your non-validating file is > completely unusable in my user agent. sure thing joey. but what is your "user agent"? i'm curious as to which program is totally unable to render that file. let me know, and i'll test it out, and see what the problem might be. if i can't get it to work, i'll be happy to send you the version that validates. -bowerbird

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re: [gutvol-d] what a difference a day makes
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 22 Sep '05

22 Sep '05

aaron said: > Most blind folks don't want to exit their screenreader > to use a program with speech support built in. > They want the other program to work with their screen reader > and their screen reader to provide the speech. got it. so i think this should be fairly straightforward, actually: put the text in an editfield for the screenreader to do its thing. i will have more questions for you, but we'll take it backchannel. *** tony said: > The rest, including Adobe Reader are also quite useless and inaccessible. that's the impression i'd gotten, yes. > WE pioneered support for Adobe Acrobat. > However, it is still difficult to convert to plain text the beauty of a plain-text format in the first place is that you don't have to do any such conversion... > and to move from page to page. do you want to even know about "pages" per se, as the numbers existed in the original paper-book? or do you want the text just to flow? or have the option? do you want to be told about things like a new section, pictures, bold or italic text, a block-quote, things like that? as you can see, i am quite naive about such things... > You can set it to load the full document > into one huge page but it will most likely > lock up the computer. Also, who wants to > read a 3,500 line book all at once? it would seem to me that bookmarking would be vital. and some kind of navigational aids are indispensable too. but what kind? i'm willing to work with you too, tony, to make this happen, but i really need your help to do it. for the nitty-gritty, we can go backchannel to talk more. (and yes, my programs will run on windows98.) -bowerbird

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re: [gutvol-d] what a difference a day makes
by Tony Baechler 22 Sep '05

22 Sep '05

Hello. I'll briefly chime in on the accessibility of various reading programs. MS Reader in itself is useless from what I've read but there is a program to convert .lit to html so that can be forced to work if it must. The rest, including Adobe Reader are also quite useless and inaccessible. I put Adobe in that class because they have done a lot and there have been great strides but it still isn't enough. I am running Window-Eyes 5.5 beta 1. WE pioneered support for Adobe Acrobat. However, it is still difficult to convert to plain text and to move from page to page. There is a key which advances to the next page but if pages are very short or if there are lots of pictures, you'll be hitting that key often (Control Pgdn) because each page will only consist of 3-4 lines if that. You can set it to load the full document into one huge page but it will most likely lock up the computer. Also, who wants to read a 3,500 line book all at once? OK, just remember your current line number and go back to it later. Then you have to wait an eternity for the page to load back into the MSAA buffer. No thanks. Also, all blank lines are stripped so it's hard to quote and preserve paragraphs or any other formatting. Finally, the latest Adobe Reader requires Windows XP which keeps all of us Windows 98 users out. So, what do I use? I convert literally every book to plain text. I use an ancient DOS viewing program which shows 22 lines per screen. If the book is very large, I just hit F1 and go to screen 300 for example. If I hit Space, it automatically scrolls through a screen at a time and reads very nicely. Because it is DOS, lines which are more than 80 characters need to be split apart with hard returns. Fortunately almost all of the PG books are perfect. I just use my view program to read the text file and it works well. It also has a search feature. The only thing it lacks is an easy way to drop a bookmark in my current position.

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re: [gutvol-d] what a difference a day makes
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 22 Sep '05

22 Sep '05

aaron said: > The problem is that the book itself is not readable. actually, the problem is you got a dated version of the app. i'll send you one that contains the text-to-speech capability. even then, however, it seems to me that i could program an app that was tailored specifically for the sight-impaired, stripping out everything that was extraneous to them and adding features that were consciously geared to their needs. i'm willing to do the work of programming such an app. but aside from some basic ideas, i'm somewhat at a loss in terms of designing it. but if you would like to guide me -- backchannel, of course -- i would certainly take that on. > If you could put the text of the book > in an edit type field, and cause the > down arrow key to move down one line at a time, > you might (and I stress might) solve it. even in the version you have, you can summon up the text in an editfield that your screenreader might be able to handle. it's under the "notes" menu, if i remember correctly, since that editfield is what is displayed when a person clicks on a footnote-indicator in the paginated text. it's also useful to a person who wants to quickly scroll through the text. a paginated display is a better vehicle for reading the text, but a scrollable field also has its benefits for some purposes. plus, in the current version is a command to copy the text of the page(s) currently displayed to the _clipboard_, where -- it is my understanding -- some screenreaders will read it. that command is under the edit menu, where you'd expect it. thanks for your feedback, i appreciate it greatly... -bowerbird

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